At Wed, 19 Jan 2011 23:25:34 +0000, Brent Spillner wrote:
On 1/19/2011 11:33 AM, Peter Dimov wrote:
This was the prevailing thinking once. First this number of bits was 16, which incorrect assumption claimed Microsoft and Java as victims, then it became 21 (or 22?). Eventually, people realized that this will never happen even if we allocate 32 bits per character, so here we are.
The OED lists ~600,000 words, so 32 bits is enough space to provide a fully pictographic alphabet for over 7,000 languages as rich as English, with room for a few line-drawing characters left over. Surely that's enough?
Even if it's theoretically possible, the best standards organization the world has come up with for addressing these issues was unable to produce a standard that did it. As far as I'm concerned, Boost is stuck with the results of the Unicode Consortium until some better standards body comes along, and the likelihood of anyone generating the will to overturn their results as the dominant paradigm is so low as to render that possibility unworthy of attention. Certainly, doing it ourselves is out-of-scope for Boost. -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com